This Strange Couple Was Arrested for the Bitfinex Scam

Cofounder Vitalik Buterin says Ethereum may never be very much faster than it is now.

Coinbase pulled the “how to buy” instructions on three cryptocurrencies after ‘rug pull’ warnings.

Morgan and Lichtenstein sounds like the name of a personal injury law firm, the kind of ambulance chasers likely to run television advertising like its a garden hose in July. Not so. They are the names of the couple arrested in the Bitfinex case where $4.5 billion in bitcoin was allegedly laundered. But this is one strange couple. Morgan, who looks like she could be your friendly school librarian, aspired to be a rapper. But she also wanted to have babies. In fact, their lawyer argued the two don’t pose a flight risk because they don’t want to stray too far from Morgan’s frozen embryos. Of course, it might be lost on poor counsel that, being frozen, she’s already separated from those little eggies as is. To pledge his love to Morgan, Lichtenstein bought billboard space to honor her rapper alter ego Razzlekhan, which sounds like a Russian musical with poorly written English subtitles. Want to get the lowdown on how the Feds caught this vicious couple—the rapper and her dapper don? Read about the chess match at Time.

Binance invests $200 million into Forbes less than two years after suing the publication for defamation.

The BBC pulled a documentary about crypto investing from the air at the last minute due to concerns about the validity of some of its content. They may have done the right thing!

Check out this interview with the CEO of SoFi Metaverse company Torum.

India’s RBI governor says cryptocurrencies have so little value they’re not even tulips.

A billion-year-old black diamond sells at an auction for $4.3 million in cryptocurrency.

Ethernity Chain wants to build into the metaverse the largest repository of intellectual property NFTs.

Kenya is exploring the possibility of a digital currency.

The Famous Browser War of the Wild and Wicked 1990s

Between 1991 and 1993, several different browsers competed for early dominance. Most were based on the UNIX operating system, which made them impractical for everyday users because most personal computers operated on OS or Windows.

Another drawback to some of the early browsers was that they weren’t graphical. That made them cumbersome for people accessing the internet from home on their early Windows-based PCs. In September 1993, a web browser called Mosaic made the World Wide Web practical for everyday use by people other than research scientists, business executives, and university professors.  It fueled the growth of the internet.

In 1994, the leader of the Mosaic development team, Marc Andreessen, left the company to start Netscape. In October, Netscape launched the Navigator browser, which grew to be very popular.

1994 was a pivotal year for the World Wide Web in another way. Yahoo! launched that year under the name Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web. It served one purpose: To catalog websites. It was the world’s first website directory. Named for its two founders, Jerry Yang and David Filo, it was one of the first attempts to create a centralized online database. By the end of 1994, there were more than 10,000 websites published.

Prior to the first website directory, there were two attempts to create a search engine for indexing websites. The first was a website called JumpStation, which utilized the first web crawler, or robot, to crawl the internet and index web pages—much like Google does today.  However, due to funding issues, the site was dead within a year.

The other project was more successful and more decentralized. ALIWEB, an acronym that stands for Archie-Like Indexing for the WEB, was announced in late 1993 but launched in 1994.  The tool was designed so that information indexed in the database could be retrieved from multiple different Archie servers and was collected through an anonymous FTP protocol. This set up maintained the internet’s initial decentralization feature and the central feature of anonymity that many blockchains attempt to create through their protocols.

In 1995, the same year Amazon launched, Microsoft developed its browser Internet Explorer, which threw a knuckleburger right into the face of Netscape Navigator and thus enflamed the famous browser war of the late 1990s.

A writer for Network World described the start of the browser war as something akin to a college fraternity prank. He wrote:

Late on the night of Sept. 30, 1997, a group of Microsoft employees strategically placed a large metal likeness of the Internet Explorer logo on the front lawn at Netscape Communications in Mountain View, Calif. – a signal that the browser war was fully ignited.

At the time, Netscape Navigator had 72 percent of the browser market. Microsoft was on its fourth iteration of Internet Explorer. When Netscape wanted to release a version of its browser for Windows 95, Microsoft tried to discourage it and the U.S. Department of Justice sued. Eventually, Microsoft won the first battle in the browser wars, but it was a long fight that pitted the world’s largest company at the time with an upstart that was winning in one small part of Microsoft’s overall business.

An excerpt from my forthcoming book Cryptosocial: How Cryptocurrencies Are Changing Social Media, to be published by Business Expert Press in March 2022. Join my launch team.

Cryptocracy is a decentralized newsletter published 4 times a week. I curate the latest news and crypto analysis from some of the brightest minds in crypto, and sometimes offer a little insightful and snarky commentary. Always fresh, always interesting, and always crypto.

First published at Cryptocracy. Not financial advice.

Image credit: New York Post